Presidential politics 161interests that go to make up the American polity, but it represents very little
in terms of actual decision-making, for the decisions are taken elsewhere.
Similarly, the cabinet fails to make any significant contribution to the so-
lution of that problem of coordinating the activities of the governmental
machine that is so critically important in modern government. To help the
president to perform this function, therefore, a quite distinct set of institu-
tions has been evolved.
The Executive Office of the President
The president heads an administration that includes some 2,750,000 federal
civil servants, as well as 1,500,000 members of the armed forces. In addition
to the fifteen executive departments, there are over forty independent agen-
cies of the federal government together with a plethora of advisory boards,
committees and commissions. The president stands in a solitary position of
overall responsibility for the acts of this enormous machine and must di-
rect and coordinate its activities, and to do this requires information about
its operations, assessments of policy needs, and a means of ensuring that
presidential decisions, and those of the Congress, are carried out effectively
and in the spirit in which they were intended. The problem of channelling
information and advice upwards to the president and of transmitting com-
mands down through the machinery of government, as well as the complex
problems of liaison with the Congress, have inevitably increased with the
enormous expansion of the functions of the federal government. The size
of the presidential staffs gradually increased in a rather haphazard fashion
until the New Deal programmes of Franklin D. Roosevelt imposed an intoler-
able strain upon the existing machinery. In 1937 the President’s Committee
on Administrative Management emphasised the need to equip the president
with an organisation to control and coordinate the administration effectively.
As a result, Congress passed the Reorganization Act of 1939, and empowered
President Roosevelt to establish the Executive Office of the President. This
he did by Executive Order 8248, in September 1939. Clinton Rossiter has de-
scribed this as an innovation that saved the presidency from paralysis and the
Constitution from radical amendment. The Executive Office has become the
heart of the administration, providing the president with information and
advice, attempting to foresee future trends in government and to forecast
future problems for the government. It conducts the president’s relations
with the Congress, with the press and the general public, and supervises the
implementation of presidential decisions.
Under President Bush the Executive Office consists of eleven subdivisions
to advise and assist the president, including the White House Office, the
Office of Management and Budget, the Council of Economic Advisers, the
National Security Council, the Office of National Drug Control Policy, the
Office of Science and Technology Policy, and the Office of the United States
Trade Representative.